The photographs were taken in Jerusalem’s open areas, in the valleys, along an imaginary axis whose general direction is east-west, from the Southern Wall and the Ben Hinnom Valley (the Cinematheque area) toward the Refa’im Steam (in the vicinity of Moshav Ora); areas that survived thanks to British Mandate law that prevented construction in these valleys. Apart from the Southern Wall, these are places devoid of historic heroism. The majority of them are sites adjacent to the surrounding neighborhoods of the city (Rassco, Katamon, Ir Ganim) from which social protest movements emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.
Railroad apartment buildings on the outskirts of an open area, an ancient tumulus (mound of stones), and a small slice of nature – elements, which in 1950s’ and 1960s’ visual formulation were used to disseminate the values of mass settlement of the land and conquest of the wilderness – are now linked to another discourse, that of environmental conservation, as part of which the signifiers of the “wilderness” and “Mizrahi revolution” have become “leisure infrastructures” and “green lungs.” During the War of Independence these valleys were cultivated, and their agricultural yield was crucial in feeding the city’s besieged population. After the war, Arab orchards and olive groves were left in the area, eventually deteriorating as a result of inattention and neglect. In their stead or by their side new orchards were planted and cultivated until the early 1990s.
The visibility and significance of the photographed sites are influenced by actual occurrences in their environs. It is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to dissociate them from the events of the war taking place in their midst – the scores of victims of suicide terrorist attacks in the buses that exploded near the Pat Junction and in Kiryat Menachem neighborhood in 2002. Furthermore, contemporary reception, free of sentimental exaggeration or romantic interpretation, cannot ignore the construction of a wall separating Jewish population from Palestinian population in Jerusalem and its surroundings (Abu Dis, al-Azariya). The photographed area between the Kidron Valley in the east and the Refa’im Stream in the west has been demarcated on the east and south by the “Jerusalem envelope route”, a euphemism for the separation fence currently being erected in the city. Against this backdrop, the barren landscapes that have remained at the margins of both the war and the news, acquire an apocalyptic air, concealing existential anxiety, alienation and desolation. In the shadow of ostensibly incontrovertible myths, the family picnic in the Valley of the Deer seems like trespassing, a positive transgression, a yearning for normalcy.
Joseph Nahmias
Exhibition Curator
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